Southern Baptists Show Their Blind Side, Again

By Greg Wilson

Editor/Publisher

At the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans this week, the gathering of the world's largest Protestant denomination (nearly double the size of the second largest group), once again has managed to allow the spotlight to be hijacked by the kind of mindless minutiae which has greased the skids for five consecutive years of membership decline.

Following what should have been, and for a short time was, an amazing celebration with the Tuesday election of the group's first African-American president, New Orleans native and pastor the Rev. Fred Luter, the Baptists apparently could not help themselves and followed up with a move to ban the movie "The Blind Side" from their Lifeway Christian Bookstore in a resolution saying the film "contains explicit profanity, God's name in vain, and racial slur."

The movie, which tells the story of how an evangelical Christian family took in and eventually adopted a homeless young man (Michael Oher, who went on to play in the NFL), received Academy Award nominations for best picture and awarded the Best Actress Oscar to Sandra Bullock for the film in 2009. It has been reviewed and recommended for family viewing by a number of Christian websites, including the Focus on the Family site "Plugged In" which found the Christianity portrayed by the family in the film: "refreshingly three-dimensional, and we see into their souls just enough to know that faith in Jesus is a prime factor in their best, most generous tendencies."

Instead of finding redeeming value in a film which does not depict Christians as serial killers, pedophiles or toothless innocents, the Baptists instead chose to do a cherry-pick count of the number of profanities in the film, oblvious to the context or overall message of the film.

This is not a rallying cry to return the movie to Lifeway shelves. Anyone who wanted to see this movie has likely seen it by now. ABC has run it at least twice on broadcast television. What I am more concerned about is the continued expressions of moral indignation that make the work of Southern Baptist churches and pastors more difficult.

As the Rev. Jack Hayford once said: "There is no more room in the barns of righteous indignation. They are full. Shaking our heads at the ills of society does not change hearts." Somebody needs to put this on a t shirt and see if Lifeway will sell it.

The Baptists have a history of this sort of thing, one of many reasons the conventions themselves attract less than half the number of messengers (delegates) the meetings drew a couple of decades ago. I have watched the decline of the denomination over the last 35 or so years from a front row seat. I am the product of a Southern Baptist college and two Southern Baptist seminaries. I have both attended the conventions as a messenger and as a journalist.

The annual meetings were once a gathering of pastors, missionaries from across the globe, educators and laity to renew old friendships, get updates on missions, check out the latest literature and to join together in a combination of worship and business meetings all loosely connected by the concept of the cooperating to make spreading the gospel in a unified and more financially efficient manner. None of these meetings were ever perfect expressions, nor were the pre-conference pastors' conferences, but by and large the heart of the denomination was focused.

Not going to write a history of the the splintering off of the the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1990. It was clear that politics overruled mission at the San Antonio Convention in 1988 when Southern Baptists elected the Rev. Jerrry Vines president over the Rev. Richard Jackson, who despite having more baptisms, growth and giving to the denomination lost the office for lack of playing to the internal political parties. Things were never the same after that for Southern Baptists.

The years that followed featured such things as the much ballyhooed boycott of Disney, which did not seem to deter very many pastors or their families from the theme park during conventions held in Orlando. The issue was allegedly to protest Disney's perceived support of homosexual rights, but instead became a news story which created mostly derisive laughter and outright hypocrisy. It became the ultimate example of a failed boycott.

Meanwhile those who are not people of faith are avoiding the Baptist in record numbers. Even their own internal survey found that close to half of those survey who classified themselves as non-church goes had a negative view of Southern Baptists and their churches. This should be a very real concern to a church who has rallied behind the call to seek and save the lost.

This does not mean Baptists should be passive. But moral pronouncements do little to change hearts or help the local pastors, churches and lay people change their communities in meaningful ways. The mission and vision statements of the Southern Baptist Convention are full of statements proclaiming a purpose of spreading a passion for Jesus and other people and making it clear that Jesus is the only hope for the world.

But such lofty goals have been overshadowed in recent years by allowing allowing compassionate evangelism to take a back seat to the preaching to the choir messages of ineffective commentary on social issues which cannot be changed through proclamation or condemnation.

With still close to 16,000,000 members, the Southern Baptist Convention is not in danger of closing up shop anytime soon. But the do face a very real danger of being an irrelevant Leviathan if they continue down the path of using their increasingly bully pulpit to tell the world what's wrong rather than pointing to the source of that which is right.